Managing in the New Normal : Positive Management Leads to Higher Goal Attainment, Commitment, and Perceived Efficacy in Virtual Work Settings

The COVID-19 global pandemic will likely change how organizations conduct business in the near future. In this “new normal”, it is likely that flexible work arrangements (e.g., “work-from-home”) will become increasingly more frequent in modern organizations.Our work claims that in the new normal, traditional management practices like unilaterally assigning goals and displaying contingent rewarding behaviors will leave place to positive management practices. To test such overarching prediction, in a panel laboratory experiment consisting of a baseline measurement and 2 work sessions, we randomly assigned participants to an authentic vs. transactional leader condition (amateur actor) and one of three possible goal setting types. Our results show that participants in the authentic leadership x self-set goals condition outperformed all other experimental conditions. Further in a post-hoc analyses we found a serial mediation effect of (a) goal attainment and (b) goal commitment at time 1 on perceived task efficacy reports at time 2